The Tribe
The closing gala and awards ceremony of the 59th Cork Film Festival took place on Sunday night and the Gradam Spiorad na Féile (Spirit of the Festival Award), which was inaugurated at the Festival this year, was won by The Tribe, by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy (Ukraine). The Tribe is a powerful dramatic thriller, entirely in Ukrainian Sign Language, with no subtitles, yet made for a hearing audience.
Here is an an exclusive clip from the upcoming film Delusions of Guinevere, directed by Joanna Bowzer (producer, co-writer), and starring Ariana Bernstein (producer, co-writer). In the clip, former child star, Guinevere James, who now at 29, is washed up, overweight, attempting numerous times to make a YouTube video for her “fans.” Delusions of Guinevere opens theatrically in Los Angeles on November 14th at the Arena Cinemas and in New York on December 5th at the Cinema Village.
SEASONS OF LOVE
The full program line-up is released for this year’s 17th Annual African-American Women In Cinema Film Festival taking place November 19th to 22nd in New York City. The Opening Night selection is the New York premiere of Princess Monique’s SEASONS OF LOVE. Starring Gladys Knight, Taraji P. Henson, Method Man and LeToya Luckett, the film follows one couple’s romantic ups and downs, as they struggle to determine the things that matter most in life. The film also features Ana Isabella, a rising star from Puerto Rico. The film is a Lifetime Studios production and will premiere on Lifetime on November 23rd. The festival will close with an awards VIP reception that will take place at the United Nations and the Nigerian Embassy, respectively.
Those Who Feel the Fire Burning by Morgan Knibbe
15 films have been selected for the competition program for feature-length documentary in the upcoming IDFA, the 27th edition of which takes place from November 19 to 30, in Amsterdam. Two of these competitors are local Dutch productions: Around The World in 50 Concerts by Heddy Honigmann and Those Who Feel the Fire Burning by Morgan Knibbe. The jury, made up of Anne Aghion (USA), Talal Derki (Syria), Sandra den Hamer (the Netherlands), Joshua Oppenheimer (Denmark) and Alina Rudnitskaya (Russia) will present the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, with a cash prize of € 12,500.
BIG IN JAPAN
The 11th edition of the Bahamas International Film Festival (BIFF), which takes place December 4-9, 2014 in Nassau and December 10-14, in Harbour Island, Eleuthera will showcase 95 films from 30 different countries, including 48 features and 47 short films of which several are international premieres and all are Bahamian premieres. “LIKE SUNDAY LIKE RAIN” starring, Starring Leighton Meester (Gossip Girls) and Debra Messing (Will And Grace) and Billy Joe Armstrong, will open the festival with a red carpet screening at the Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island on Thursday, December 4th. American Comedy “BIG IN JAPAN” starring Phillip Peterson, Sean Lowry, David Drury, Alex Vincent, Adam Powers as Mans will close the festival with an evening screening on Sunday, December 7th – also at the Atlantis Theater.
Perpetual Sadness
The Mexican film Perpetual Sadness directed by Jorge Perez Solano, took the top prize Best Feature Film Award – Golden Alexander Theo Angelopoulos at the 55th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Perpetual Sadness tells the story of women in a remote Mexican village in the desert, where they experience solitude and the sorrow of being abandoned. The film “Next to Her,” directed by Israeli Asaf Korman, won the “Silver Alexander.”
IDA
The European Film Academy announced the nominations for the 27th European Film Awards. For the top prize, the European Film of 2014, the nominees include FORCE MAJEURE, IDA, LEVIATHAN, NYMPHOMANIAC DIRECTOR’S CUT – VOLUME I & II and WINTER SLEEP. Andrey Zvyagintsev director of LEVIATHAN (LEVIAFAN), Paweł Pawlikowski director of IDA and Ruben Östlund director of FORCE MAJEURE (TURIST), also received nominations for Best Director. The winners will be announced during the awards ceremony on 13 December in Riga, Latvia, European Capital of Culture 2014.
RETURN OF THE RIVER
The Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon, announced the line-up for its 41st annual survey of new work by regional media artists, the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival (formerly the Northwest Film & Video Festival), which takes place November 7-15, 2014. This year’s Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival (NWFest41) presents 45+ short and feature films from filmmakers across the Northwest, selected by guest Festival judge Christopher Rauschenberg, much lauded photographer and co-founder of Portland’s trailblazing Blue Sky Gallery. Festival film highlights include Vera Brenner-Sung’s “meditation on displacement and adaptation in the contemporary American West,” BELLA VISTA; John Gussman and Jessica Plumb’s ecologically-minded documentary RETURN OF THE RIVER, concerning water and tribal rights on the Elwha River; Beth Harrington’s THE WINDING STREAM, an examination of the enduring impact of the original Carter Family on the musical landscape; and Sue Arbuthnot and Richard Wilhelm’s family farming doc, DRYLAND.
Tribeca Film will release Uberto Pasolini’s award-winning film Still Life from Beta Cinema in theaters January 16, 2015 with cable/telco and satellite video-on-demand and digital platforms starting January 13, 2015. Written and directed by Pasolini, the film stars Eddie Marsan (Happy-Go-Lucky) and Joanne Froggatt (Emmy® Award nominee, “Downton Abbey”). The film had its world premiere at the 2013 Venice Film Festival where it won four awards: the Orizzonti Award for Best Director, the Pasinetti Award for Best Film, Cinema D’Arte e d’Essai award, and the Civitas Vitae prossima for Best Film.
Many recent Hollywood blockbusters have taken well-known fictional characters and depicted their earliest adventures in prequels or origin films. With THE BETTER ANGELS, it appears that the origin film trend has now encompassed historical figures because the film portrays the childhood of Abraham Lincoln. THE BETTER ANGELS is the debut film from writer/director A.J. Edwards, a collaborator of Terrence Malick who worked in various roles on The New World, The Tree of Life, and To the Wonder (Malick also serves as a producer of THE BETTER ANGELS).
Towards the end of MANHATTAN ROMANCE, Danny (Tom O’Brien, who also wrote, directed, and produced this movie) is presenting a documentary he created about New York relationships at a film festival. When an audience member asks Danny why his film lacks a resolution, Danny gives a semi-annoyed response about how life doesn’t have clean resolutions so there is no reason why films should have them either. There’s nothing wrong with that sentiment – plenty of great movies end unresolved – but when an actor/writer/producer/director expresses that shortly before the credits in his own film, it sounds like a preemptive defense of his lack of confidence in the ending of his own movie.
The tagline for FUGLY! – co-written and starring John Leguizamo – declares it “An Anti-Romantic Comedy.” However, that’s like putting a sign on a duck that says “this is not a duck” and expecting people to think it’s another animal. FUGLY! might not be melodramatic, but it’s as much of a romantic comedy as Garden State, 500 Days of Summer, or any other movie involving a male protagonist pining over a girl whom he thinks is the cure-all to his imperfections despite she being imperfect herself.